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A chat with a doctor or a nurse is also the only cost-effective way of getting people to be more active, Nice said.

Issuing its first public health guidance, Nice said there was a belief among health professionals that trying to persuade people to stop smoking or take more exercise was useless.

"Now we can reassure them they are not wasting their breath," said Dagmar Zeuner, the director of public health for Islington Primary Care Trust, north London, and a member of the advisory panel.

She compared the power of a chat with the GP to the discovery of a new drug to stop smoking.

"This should be part of the core business of GPs, and smokers have a right to get it." Stopping smoking is difficult for individual smokers but the benefits to health are so great that even if only two in 100 smokers who receive a six-minute chat go on to give up, the 10 hours of effort by the GP is cost-effective, Nice calculated.

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Cytokinetics has already abandoned part of the study last September, because the drug, Ispinesib, did not demonstrate sufficient anti-tumor activity in patients with platinum-refractory cancer.

The company then said it was continuing the part of the study that focused on platinum-sensitive cancer.

GlaxoSmithKline is also conducting two Phase II trials, one to evaluate the drug as a second or third-line treatment for people with an advanced form of breast cancer, and one as a second-line treatment for advanced ovarian cancer.

Shares of Cytokinetics fell 44 cents, or 6.1 percent, to $6.75 in after-hours trading, having earlier closed at $7.19 on the Nasdaq.

The stock has traded between $4.61 and $9.75 over the past year.

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